Monthly Archives: September 2012

The Los Angeles Dodgers entered play on Sunday September 30, 1962 — the last day of the regular season — with a one game lead over the San Francisco Giants. The Dodgers could win the National League pennant by beating the St. Louis Cardinals in Los Angeles. And even if the Dodgers lost, the Giants would still need to beat the Houston Colt 45s in San Francisco to force a »

…but it is remarkably fun and satisfying. My son and I went to a local shooting range this afternoon, as we do most weekends, and fired off 300 rounds, using all four of our semiautomatic pistols, my son’s Ruger and Kahr and my SIG Sauer and ArmaLite. In general, we shot well, with the usual caveats: it is easier to shoot a full-sized gun accurately than a smaller carry piece. »

Earlier today, Steve gave this week’s Green Weenie award to Matt Damon for the anti-fracking movie Promised Land, which, it turns out, was financed by the United Arab Emirates. Who, trust me, acted out of a noble concern for the environment and had no thought of suppressing American fossil fuel development which would compete with the Emirates’ product and likely cost the Emirates billions of dollars. But the movie is »

The “Great Disconnect” indeed. Or perhaps I should say The Reckless Mind indeed. I’ll have a lot more to say later on about Mark Lilla’s lead review of Charles Kesler’s I Am the Change in today’s New York Times Book Review, so consider this post a mere placeholder. Let’s start here: One of the most disgusting aspects of the mainstream media’s toadying to Obama is the total incuriosity about »

Three years ago, we followed the story of four Uighurs, Muslims from China who were captured in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan not long after 9/11, and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where they spent seven years before finally being released to a new home in the island paradise of Bermuda. The bizarre contrast between the Uighurs’ past in East Turkestan and Guantanamo Bay and their future in one of »

Or should I say, Team America-style, Matt Daayyymonnnn. Yes, I think we should. So his Damonness is coming out in December with a feature film entitled Promised Land that is intended to do to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas what The China Syndrome did for nuclear power way back when. You can watch the trailer here if you want, and grasp the full propaganda intent of the film. Even though »

And because it’s getting close to the fall wine grape harvest, and the fall releases are ready to be snapped up, I think I know what I’ll be doing this afternoon. Where shall I stop in first? Here, here, or here? I’ve got wine reserved at all three places. In the meantime, Power Line needs to keep up its oenophilic imagery: »

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough hangs around with a bad crowd at MSNBC, and it has had the predictable Stockholm Syndrome effect, as David Brooks’s tenure at the New York Time has had on him. In the infamous video below, Scarborough histrionically condemns Mitt Romney based on a misleading account of the Romney/Ryan campaign appearance outside Dayton last week. The Blaze picked it up here. BuzzFeed followed up with a »

The phenomenon of political correctness is ubiquitous. Someone could write a good book about it. Dinesh D’Souza devoted his precocious first book — Illiberal Education — to the higher education branch of the subject twenty years ago. To say matters have not improved would be a considerable understatement. Chapter 7 of the book addresses the teaching of race and gender at Harvard. To say that matters have not improved on »

The regular NFL referees are back at work, their labor dispute with the league having been resolved. Good. The replacement refs who worked the first three games of the season were poor. However, the performance of the replacements didn’t just highlight their own shortcomings. They also highlighted imperfections in the pro game itself. Consider the bitter complaints we heard so often during the past few weeks: With all the confusion »

On our podcast today, Brian Ward, Steve Hayward and I talked about the obviously bogus polls that purport to show Barack Obama with a big lead in various swing states, even though those same polls show Romney winning independent voters by significant margins. Those results make sense only if enormous numbers of voters are signing up as Democrats. But is there any evidence of any such trend? Not at all; »

One of this year’s most-watched races pits far-left Ohio Senate incumbent Sherrod Brown against Power Line Pick Six candidate Josh Mandel. Last week I caught up with Josh on the phone, and we recorded this interview: Brown held an early lead which Josh has steadily eroded. Today the race is a dead heat. Its outcome will have a huge influence on whether the GOP is able to wrest control of »

This morning Brian Ward and I recorded episode 33 of the Hinderaker-Ward Experience, joined by our own Steve Hayward as a guest. We talked about the gloom that seems to have settled over many of our fellow conservatives. We are seeing it here at Power Line: a few weeks ago, we were experiencing some of the strongest traffic in the history of the site. It was obvious that conservatives were »

Much has been made of Barack Obama’s unwillingness to engage with foreign leaders during the recent events at the United Nations, and the priority that he consistently gives to campaigning and fundraising over discharging his ostensible duties as president. Michael Ramirez sums up the critique by contrasting Benjamin Netanyahu’s concept of a red line with that of our president: »

On Saturday, September 29, 1962, the Los Angeles Dodgers squandered an opportunity to clinch the National League pennant when they lost 2-0 to the St. Louis Cardinals. 25-game winner Don Drysdale pitched brilliantly for the Dodgers, limiting St. Louis to 5 hits and no earned runs. But the Cards scored 2 in the second inning thanks to an error by lumbering Frank Howard on a Dal Maxvill fly ball. Ernie »

Since the Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern misprision continues, perhaps another word of advice from Sir Winston, made in 1958, is in order: The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world. It has always been fought over, and peace has only reigned when a major power has established firm influence and shown that it will maintain its will. Your friends must be supported with every vigour and »